Idea to Startup: Why You're Struggling with the Easy Stuff as a Founder

Podcast | Youtube

Sponsor: Help Brian Write a Book

I’m writing a book. If you’d like to help (read early chapters and give feedback, chat with me about ideas, etc.), sign up here.

This Episode

Today, we talk about why you struggle so much with easy, seemingly straightforward tasks as a founder. You probably assume this is a productivity problem, but it's actually a nervous system problem - you've maxed out your Risk Threshold. We talk about how to navigate that and build a startup while being a human.

One of my favorites in a while. Enjoy.

Pod References

• Help Brian Write a Book

• Tacklebox

  
  02:34 - Why Easy Stuff is Hard
  05:02 - Your Risk Threshold
  07:15 - The Riskiness Equation
  11:27 - Why This Is So Bad and What To Do
  14:14 - The End

Transcript - feel free to read like a long-form article

Today, we’re talking about why it’s so freaking hard for you, as a founder, to do things that should be objectively simple and straightforward. Why an email takes a few hours or why you’ll avoid creating simple ads for weeks or why, even though you know you can outsource just about anything for a $10-20 an hour, you just don’t do it.

My guess is you think it’s a productivity problem. It’s not. Today we’ll talk about what it actually is and how to fix it.

But before we get there, I’ve got an update and I’ve got a request.

First, the update.

You might’ve noticed we’ve been mixing in some classic episodes here and there. I know a lot of newer folks haven’t heard em , so I’m mixing in the ones that got the most traction and shares.

The reason for this is that I’m writing a book. It’s a long time coming and so far it’s been a blast. And by blast, I mean an overwhelming, frustrating, time guzzling monstrosity.

I’ve got about 5,000 things I want to say but I’m trying to take my own medicine and focus on a specific moment and a single problem - a dam in the river. It turns out my medicine is easier to prescribe than take.

So, that’s the update - I’m writing a book so we’ll have a few classic episodes mixed in, and might even do an interview or something unscripted here and there.

And now, the request.

IF the book sounds interesting to you, I’d love to have you on board as I write it.

I’m approaching this book like I’d approach any business, so early, frequent customer feedback and tight feedback loops is the priority, which means I need some champions.

This will include stuff like reading early chapters and giving feedback on the balance of Ruby anecdotes and hemsworth jokes.

There will be rewards for the champions - a few free copies of the book and some other stuff we’ve been working on, like a mug I’ve been thinking about making for years.

There’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up. You can also email [email protected] with the subject Reader and we’ll get you set up.

Ok - that’s out of the way. Let’s knock out todays pod. No jazz, I’ve bothered you enough already.

Without further ado, let’s all shift to the town I currently live in, in sunny, suburban, some might say boring, Connecticut.

Why Easy Stuff Is Hard

The leaves are changing, it’s dark and 44 degrees at 7am, and I’m once again trying to figure out if my boys are old enough to watch Ghostbusters. I think the answer is unequivocally no, since they’re both under 3, but I can’t tell you it isn’t on my mind. One of the hardest parts of parenting is not trying to zoom forward, because you know once you get there you’ll want to zoom back.

Anyway, when all those things happen you know it’s local election time. Those mini sandwich board signs will start sprouting like clusters of mushrooms all over intersections and highway ramps. I took a picture of one such intersection that had 17 signs on it - here’s a quick overview:

We’ve got a sign for Harris and Shackleford that says New Voices, Real Change, one for Abby Tolan that says “for every child,” with every in italics, passive aggressively implying that whoever her competition is is very much not for every child. Then there’s Nancy Kail who says she’s the, quote, Healthy Choice, which is upsetting because her last name is kail - some sort of kale pun couldn’t have been that much of a leap, and David Sanderson who’s tagline is “I’m ready to do this!” with an exclamation point. Finally, there’s Jim who it seems like didn’t realize he needed a slogan and as he was paying the sign maker shouted at him “Jim! I need a slogan in the next 3 seconds!” and he blurted out “Vote Jim! He’s the ticket!” and out it went. Poor Jim didn’t even put his last name anywhere. It’s like he’s running against his own will.

There are like 13 others that I won’t get into which are somehow even worse than that first group.

So, what the heck is going on here?

Are Harris and Shackleford expecting us to drive by at 35 mph, pick their sign out of the mess of 16 other identical ones, see that they’re offering New Voices and Real Change and… vote for them?

And yes, I know that name recognition is useful, but that argument kind of dies when you’re jammed up against 17 other identical signs.

So… what’s happening? Are these the best ideas that Abby Tolan and Nancy Kail, and David Sanderson and our guy Jim are capable of?

No. Definitely not.

The problem is that they’re human, which means they put up their sandwich board next to 16 other sandwich boards and they hope.

The hardest part about doing anything in public - whether it’s running for office or starting a startup - aren’t the tasks associated with that thing. It’s the fact that you have to do those tasks while being human.

Which brings us to your Risk Threshold.

Your Risk Threshold

Risk is slippery.

If you’re a regular listener you know we’ve had a few things happen in our family the past year that were difficult. As a result, we’re all in therapy to keep everything moving the right direction. Highly recommend it if you’re on the fence.

Anyway, one of the more helpful parts for me has been getting a better understanding of how we perceive and respond to risk.

Humans have like 300,000 years where the feeling of risk was derived from a threat of bodily harm. Then, like 100 years where the stuff that had been a bodily harm risk for the previous 299k years wasn’t any more. Our nervous systems haven’t caught up.

Quick note - a nice little tip when you start to feel stressed or flustered and the adrenaline is flowing is to stop and think - am I at risk of bodily harm? The answer is almost always no, and just acknowledging that will cool your internal jets a bit.

Back to our hopeful local politicians.

When humans do something like running for their local public office, it feels extremely risky, because for 300k years it was. Straying from the herd in any way meant risking bodily harm. Your nervous system doesn’t realize that this is no longer the case - it just sees you doing something most of the people you know aren’t doing and it freaks out.

This means that when it comes time for your distribution strategy - how you’re going to further publicize and spread this already risky thing you’ve chosen to do - your Risk Threshold is maxed out and your nervous system snaps you back like a rubber band.

“You already did this one risky thing, let’s chill on the risk for a bit, huh harris and shackleford?”

And that’s why all the signs are next to each other. Not because it’s the best idea Jim with no last name had, but because he, and everyone else, didn’t have the nervous system bandwidth to do something else. And clustering all your signs creates a whole new herd, and that feels safe. It soothes your nervous system.

And that’s why no one could even muster up the strength to make their sign two feet higher than all the other signs. Something you’d assume was illegal but isn’t, I checked. Their nervous system was already maxed out.

The Riskiness Equation

The corollary to startups is obvious.

You start a company, something your nervous system hates, and it maxes out your Risk Threshold. Your nervous system pushes you to follow the safest path for the foreseeable future to try to balance out the initial risky decision.

It’s usually easier to navigate these sorts of problems with an equation, so, knowing full well podcasts are an absolutely horrible medium for an equation, I drew one up for how humans perceive riskiness.

Perceived Riskiness = How many people you know who have done this thing before x how public failing would be

If you’re more into visualizations, a good one is to think of risk as the distance between what your nervous system has handled before and what you’re asking it to do now, in public.

Think of your Risk Threshold as your body’s tolerance for standing out, and Perceived Riskiness as what drains it.

Most people running for school board seem to be doing it for the first time - nearly every sandwich board is talking about new voices and change. Some issue pushed them so hard that they said you know what, I’ll fix it. I’ll sign up for this race and tell my friends and put it on Facebook and Instagram and make the thing public. Perceived riskiness explodes.

In the equation, very few people they know - if any - have done this before, and a failure would be very public. The negroni of all risk cocktails.

For founders, it’s the same.

Most people you know haven’t started a company. And if you’re starting a company in earnest, especially if you’ve told your friends, it’s public. The risk equation is blaring.

Let’s say you’re building a company that’ll sell inventory management software to restaurants. When it becomes clear that you need to talk to chefs and general managers of restaurants, a relatively simple task with no risk of bodily harm, your nervous system will clam up. You’re layering more things that upset the risk equation.

You don’t know people who have walked into restaurants cold and asked to speak to the manager or the chef and transitioned that into an interview or a sales pitch. And, the fear that that manager or chef might be uninterested is the fear of public failure.

Founders find that the hardest tasks are the ones most specific to their business.

Which is why pivoting from talking to chefs to creating a business plan is so palatable. Business plans aren’t foreign. You know people who make them. And, failure with a business plan isn’t clear and it isn’t public. A business plan is safe. Way safer than talking to strangers.

So, make a business plan and say you’re planning to raise money. Come back to the herd. Calm your nervous system.

If you’re running for local treasurer, you could stand outside of the grocery store on Saturday mornings with coffee and donuts and talk to the 200 people who walk through about what budget item they most want fixed. Or you could knock on all the doors of voters who were impacted by a property tax increase. Or you could host a “ask me anything about where your taxes go” night at a local brewery and film it and splice it up for social posts or emails.

But your nervous system was already tapped by the act of running, so you’ll just put up a sandwich board amongst the 16 others. Not too tall. The same height as all the rest.

If you’re building a startup, you could talk directly to all the chefs at restaurants in your town, recognize that there’s a specific feature they need that’ll solve a painful, urgent, expensive inventory management problem. But your nervous system is tapped, so you plan to build all the features competitors have plus a few incremental add-ons and hope it works.

The actual founder with the restaurant software startup who is having trouble with this found a nice go-between, a way to warm up her nervous system. She talked to some chefs, but also went to a restauranteur reddit thread and asked the question: “what’s the dumbest thing about inventory software?” and got 50 responses.

Why this is so bad

The worst part of your nervous system misunderstanding risk and snapping to safety is that customers reward the total opposite behavior.

Businesses work when they help their customers make a decision. When there’s clear contrast between them and the other options. When you don’t all offer the same features or show up in the same place looking identical.

Your nervous system is actively pushing you to build a product customers won’t choose. You’re being sabotaged.

What to do

There are a few ways to counteract this.

First, you can look at the equation and change one of the variables. If a huge part of what we perceive as risky is stuff our peer group isn’t doing, then we can change your peer group. Put your butt where your heart is and make sure your social network includes a whole bunch of people starting companies.

The other side of the equation can also be dampened with two consistent reminders - two things I’d write on the top of your to do list each morning.

First: No one is paying attention to what you do. Everyone is the star of their own movie. This seemingly public failure won’t even register as a blip in anyone else’s life. In the immortal words of david foster wallace, “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

And second: The only way you’ll be successful is if you create contrast. If all your competitors offer a feature, you can’t. If all your competitors advertise in one channel, find another.

This might sound like bad advice, but that’s just your nervous system talking. Breaking from the herd always feels like a strategic misstep. But, the only way to get someone to pick you early, before you’ve got testimonials and a full set of features and marketing with money behind it, is contrast.

The messaging: “all our competitors offer X, Y, Z. We don’t. We offer A, and that’s better for you, because it solves this problem for you,” is the level of specificity you’ll need to get someone to take a chance on you.

I guess I’ll add one more thing to the top of your to do list. It’s getting cluttered. But when you go to do something different and your brain balks, ask the question - if this fails, will it cause bodily harm? The answer will almost certainly be “no,” and you’ll realize the risk is actually in not doing something different.

This is the key to the smaller tasks that keep tripping you up.

Why you’re stalled on things that seem so simple.

Ask, am I struggling because I don’t know anyone who’s done this and I think failure might be public? Or am I struggling because there’s actually serious risk? It’ll nearly always be the first.

It might feel like you’ve got a productivity problem, but it’s just a nervous system problem. And we can solve it.

The End

It’s very much not your fault that the small things are hard. Cold emails, landing pages, attending a conference - these are disasters for our risk equation - unique and public. Training yourself to understand why they’re hard, reminding yourself that these aren’t actual bodily risks, surrounding yourself with more people doing these sorts of things, and recognizing that contrast is your only path to success is critical.

That and if your last name is Kale and you’re running for the public health position, maybe take advantage of it? There’s a leafy green pun in there somewhere, right? Something with fiber? Something about emotional cabbage? In fairness I just spent 10 minutes trying to come up with a kale pun and I couldn’t do it. I’ve lost all my vegetable puns. I hope they turnip somewhere…

Sorry.

This was the idea to startup podcast brought to you by tacklebox. If you’ve got a startup idea, sign up at gettacklebox dot com to get help with it. And if you’re interested in reading the book, check the show notes.

Hava a great week